a brother such as you. If Papa was alive he would kill you himself. But since he is not, I am going to do it…”
The dining room fell into an eerie silence, broken only by the condemned man’s heavy breathing—and then by the two quick shots that Nick triggered at his brother’s head.
Twin holes tore open George Colouvos’ temple, and blood spurted in torrents from them.
Maria Colouvos screamed hysterically as her brother-in-law collapsed on the table, his head falling into the baklava.
As the echoes of the gunfire subsided, Yale moved quickly.
“All right, Nick, grab his feet and help me put the body on the kitchen floor,” he instructed. “I don’t want to get blood on the carpet in here.”
Taking hold of George’s limp upper torso under the armpits, Frankie lifted the dead man out of his chair as Nick lifted his brother’s feet off the floor. They carried George’s body to the kitchen and laid it on the linoleum, which Olympia’s mother later mopped to remove the blood that still trickled from the two head wounds.
At about nine o’clock that night, as darkness descended, Yale and Colouvos carried the blanket-wrapped corpse to the street, stuffed it into the trunk of Colouvos’ sedan, and drove to the New Jersey ferry.
Their destination had already been mapped by the Mafia overlord: a weeded-covered illegal dumpsite in Lyndenhurst close to the Passaic River. They sprinkled quicklime over the body. In just days, the flesh and bone totally disintegrated.
They drove home in silence and didn’t get in touch with each other for a week—until Nick phoned Frankie.
“My very good friend,” he said. “I want to tell you how much my little girl has improved. She is talking again and smiling like she used to. And she is eating once more. Most important, she does not have nightmares…”
Nick’s voice went silent a moment as Yale listened. Finally, Olympia’s father spoke again:
“Frankie, I want to thank you. I know what you did was because of your love for children—and that you hate to see them hurt in any way.
“You are a very fine man and on that account I am proud to call you my friend.”
Yale thanked Colouvos for those sentiments, then imparted a few words himself:
“Nick, I know you are sincere in what you just said and mean every word. And because you and I are such good friends, I want to give you this bit of advice:
“Never forget. We only kill if we have to. And they die—but only because they deserve it…
“And your brother—Amorte…he did deserve it!”
January 5, 1920 was a Monday. A chill winter day.
The wind swirled in twenty-five-mile-an-hour gusts.
The leaden gray skies threatened to disgorge the season’s first heavy snowfall.
On the Brooklyn waterfront, crews of longshoremen were busily shifting crates and bales, loading freighters bound for foreign ports, unloading cargoes shipped across the Atlantic.
PIER 2. The new sign had just been hung over the long, rectangular, narrow-fronted warehouse jutting out over the East River from the foot of Furman Street. Bright red block letters against a white background heralded the proprietorship of the Gowanus Stevedoring Company, a proud firm that had been doing business on the Brooklyn docks for more than fifty years.
Gowanus had just expanded its dock operations by taking over the Pier 2 warehouse. The new foreman, Jimmy Sullivan, was a monstrous man with huge forearms etched with gaudy tattoos of exploding bombshells—reminders of his hell as a doughboy in the trenches of the Marne and Belleau Woods during World War I. He was put into the job because he’d given honest sweat as a dockhand for Gowanus since 1902. When he’d come back from two years in the army the company needed a tough thumper to hustle the crews on the new pier. Jimmy was their boy. From his first day on the job, Sullivan showed who was boss. His thick, cracked lips and his squinting blue eyes never smiled. His flat face and the nose busted from countless pier brawls carried a message to the men: they’d better not mess with him.
At forty-eight, Jimmy Sullivan did know what had to be done on the wharf. The respect he commanded from the dockers made him a good man to run Pier 2.
One of his duties as pier superintendent was paying the weekly extortion to Denny Meehan’s White Hand collectors. Shelling out protection money was a way of life on the waterfront. It prevented the wholesale theft of cargo from the company’s warehouses and spared their merchandise-laden trucks from hijackings.
The handful of companies that had balked at coming under Meehan’s thumb were paying through the nose now. Cargoes were constantly pilfered from their piers and their trucks were constantly waylaid in the middle of the night.
Jimmy Sullivan liked everything about his job except handing over the weekly envelope to Meehan’s torpedoes. Although it wasn’t his money, Jimmy felt it was wrong. So did his boss, John O’Hara, the president of Gowanus. Jimmy’s salary as pier superintendent was a respectable $150 a week, fifty percent more than he’d been making as a dock laborer. In a sense, then, the extortion O’Hara was paying to the White Hand gang was money coming out of his pocket—and the dockworkers’.
Jimmy never let on how he felt to Meehan’s ambassadors. Generally he received them in his warehouse office—and always tried to get them out of his sight in as little time as it took to hand over the envelope containing the $1500 in cash which O’Hara sent over early every Monday morning.
Pleasantries, if exchanged, were as short as Jimmy could cut them. He felt like taking Ernie “Skinny” Shea and Wally “The Squint” Walsh, Meehan’s regular collectors, and pulverizing them with his bare hands. He often wondered how two scrawny punks like these could fit into a group with such an awesome reputation as Denny Meehan’s organized mob.
Shea got his nickname for a very apparent reason—he was five-foot-four and weighed in at under 120 pounds. He looked even skinnier: his high cheekbones and hollowed cheeks gave him the appearance of someone who routinely siphoned gasoline out of a car and drank it.
Jimmy Sullivan could swear he never got a glimpse of Wally Walsh’s eyes. His gaunt, pale face didn’t differ much from Shea’s. But it had a distinctive feature: his eyeballs never showed. Even in Sullivan’s drab office, where the forty-watt light bulb couldn’t even make a bat blink, Walsh squinted as though the high-noon sun were blazing into his eyes.
It was eleven o’clock on that Monday morning of January 5, 1920, when Shea and Walsh arrived at Pier 2. Sullivan was standing on a crate which contained religious plaster of Paris statues of St. Anthony shipped from Milan which had just been unloaded from a freighter.
As he shouted orders to the longshoremen to guide the boom lowering cargo from the freighter’s hold, a corner of his eye caught the black LaSalle that had just pulled to a stop
